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Thursday, January 14, 2016

The POTUS Position!

“True wisdom comes to each of us when we
realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around
us.” –Scorates

DDGD January 14, 2016

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Today’s
Post is brought to you by… Believers
In the Spoken Word Temple.

The Delirica

UmReeka:Video
shows American sailor apologizing for Iran incident. Iran got what it
wanted from that little naval incident: images of American soldiers kneeling in
humiliation, and apologizing. That should play well with the domestic audience,
and should send a message of strength across the region. America’s withdrawal
from the region is equivalent to means Iran’s ascendancy. There will be no
immediate price for America, but there will definitely be a regional one: more
blood will spilled across Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and soon elsewhere as
well.

Screeding: 1) A form of
journalism where established journalists rail against the injustices
perpetrated by certain regional and/or global actors, while totally ignoring or
justifying similar behavior by others with whom they have certain ideological
affinity, or whom they consider as representing a necessary or a milder form of
evil. 2) A political speech.

Saudomy: The practice of abandoning
a longtime ally in favor of a longtime enemy for no apparent reason, and despite
the fact that both the betrayed ally and the embraced enemy tend to embrace
similar ruling ideologies and embrace same troubling behavior. Rational
observers of this behavior conclude that the causes of this practice should be
sought in the inner workings and ruling ideology of the adopting side, rather
than the newly betrayed or embraced sides.

Mullanoma: A type of
chronic itch that the afflicted can never hope to scratch no matter how hard
they try. The itch is indeed known to drive certain of the afflicted,
especially those dabbling in politics, to adopt ludicrous and self-defeating
policies that end up empowering their enemies, both domestic and foreign.
However, the medications often taken to relief the itch tend to have an overall
dulling effect on all senses and sensations, thus allowing the afflicted to
revel in imaged victories and accomplishments associated with the very
defeatist policies they enacted. Currently, there are no effective treatments
for mullanoma.

Syrialysis: A form of
paralysis that befalls some politicians whenever they are required to do the moral
thing in the absence of any guarantees of eventual success and accolades.

The Daily Delirynth

“…instability
will continue for decades in many parts of the world…The world will look to us
to help solve these problems, and our answer needs to be more than tough talk
or calls to carpet-bomb civilians.” Thus Spake Zarobama

POTUS
gives a SOTU instead of a damn, with an orange-clad FLOTUS in attendance:
“…as we
focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just
play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted
souls plotting in apartments or garages, they pose an enormous danger to
civilians, they have to be stopped, but they do not threaten our national
existence.”

Obama is right, IS/Daesh does not
represent a serious not to mention existential threat to America, and there is
no threat of WWIII on its account. What it does represent is a serious and even
existential threat to various other peoples and states across the world: the secularists,
and certain religious minorities. More importantly though, we should not forget
the threat that IS backers pose, not just its obvious backers, such as the Saudi
and Wahhabi establishment and the Turkish government, but also its theoretically
“unlikely” sources, but practically the most logical ones, that is, Iran, the
Assad regime, and even Russia, which was more than happy to allow its Caucasus
Jihadis to travel to Syria, embedding few of its operatives in them, you know, for
a rainy day, which might just have come (See: Istanbul
suicide attack and ensuing arrests of three Russians).

When
you come after Americans, we go after you.

Unless, of course, you are Iran
which continues to hold Americans as prisoners under spurious charges, and the
Obama administration is not even raising the issue. There were even a number of
American citizens besieged in Madaya, and elsewhere in Syria, and still no
attempt at rescue was ever mounted. Albeit, one would imagine that the Madaya
Americans will be rescued as part of the package deal that allowed for UN aid
convoys to enter the besieged town. But who knows with this administration?

Our foreign
policy has to be focused on the threat from ISIL and Al Qaida, but it can’t
stop there. For even without ISIL, even without Al Qaida, instability will
continue for decades in many parts of the world — in the Middle East, in
Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, in parts of Central America and Africa and
Asia.

Some of these
places may become safe havens for new terrorist networks. Others will just fall
victim to ethnic conflict or famine, feeding the next wave of refugees.

The world will
look to us to help solve these problems, and our answer needs to be more than
tough talk or calls to carpet-bomb civilians. That may work as a TV sound bite,
but it doesn’t pass muster on the world stage.

We also can’t
try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis... (APPLAUSE)

... even if
it’s done with the best of intentions. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe
for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately will weaken
us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam. It’s the lesson of Iraq, and we should have
learned it by now. (APPLAUSE)

Fortunately,
there is a smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every
element of our national power. It says America will always act, alone if
necessary, to protect our people and our allies, but on issues of global
concern, we will mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other
countries pull their own weight.

That’s our
approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and
leading international efforts to help that broken society pursue a lasting
peace.

That’s why we
built a global coalition, with sanctions and principled diplomacy, to prevent a
nuclear-armed Iran. And as we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program,
shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.

…it has long been customary for various American think
tanks and research centers, some acting with partial funding from the U.S.
governments, others from relying on their endowments or private funding, to
draw up potential scenarios for future developments in regions around the
world. Over the course of decades of organizing events and drawing up such
scenarios in regard to the Middle East, a school of thought emerged that
basically contended that America’s interests will be served better in the 21st century
through improving and normalizing its relations with Iran as a new regional
power in the Middle East, while decreasing reliance on Israel, and completely
abandoning the GCC, Egypt, and even NATO’s ally Turkey. In fact, according to
this school, relations with Western Europe themselves might need to be
drastically overhauled in favor of an envisioned alliance with China. While
there is nothing wrong in bringing countries such as Iran and China from the
cold, there is a definite problem in thinking that that could only be done if
certain norms regarding human rights and democratic values are abandoned, and
the stability of entire regions is sacrificed. Why? Because the price of
standing up for these norms as well as peace and stability is deemed by this
lot to be too high. Such calculations are exactly what promises to make the 21st Century
the bloodiest in history.

And once again, President’s Obama
refers to Syria as broken, but he doesn’t explain why he failed to intervene
when it was not broken to prevent its breaking. He had ample opportunity to do
so? Then again, if he were one of those people who read the various scenarios
and thought them inevitable rather than contingent on what American chooses to
do or not do, then, why intervene? Why fight a losing war? How about: to prevent
the return of mass violence to the global scene, something that the
Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the legal doctrine that Obama supported at
one point in his career, was meant to accomplish? But that violent turn too, it
seems, was inevitable in his thinking. Was it really? We will never know.

Now, the occurrence of mass
violence is academic. Now, we have to take it on faith that it was inevitable,
in Syria, and in “the Middle East, in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, in parts of Central
America and Africa and Asia.” Now we can look forward for generations of
conflict and struggle, with powers like Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
Turkey shaping the outcomes, while America, and “on issues of global
concern,” attempts to “mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other
countries pull their own weight.” Because that’s exactly what happened
in Syria, and, as we all should know by now damn it, it worked. “That’s our
approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and
leading international efforts to help that broken society pursue a lasting
peace.”

More on my reading of SOTU
tomorrow through my biweekly post on the Lawfare Blog.

While Assad is a
“brutal dictator” who must eventually leave office, Hagel said, the United
States should have learned from the chaos that followed the abrupt removal of
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi that taking out authoritarian
leaders without knowing who will take their place is not the best solution.

“We have allowed
ourselves to get caught and paralyzed on our Syrian policy by the statement
that 'Assad must go,'” Hagel said, adding, “Assad was never our enemy.”

I wonder what it takes for
someone to become America’s enemy in Hagel’s view! Assad has American blood on
his hands, as he openly encouraged Jihadists to cross Syria’s border into Iraq,
opened training camps for them on along the borders, and hosted many Iraq’s
Baath leaders who planned anti-American attacks from their bases in Syria.
Assad assassinated a friend of America and the West in the Middle East, the late
Lebanese PM Rafic Al-Hariri, among other Lebanese luminaries. That all took
place before the revolution and before Assad embarked on his campaign of mass
murder and ethnic cleansing.

So, to correct Mr. Hagel: 1)
Assad has been America’s enemy for quite a while now, and 2) the paralysis in
Syria’s policy is in no way related to a preoccupation with Assad’s departure, because
nothing that the Obama Administration did, its rhetoric notwithstanding, ever mounted
to a serious effort to achieve this end. Its willingness to walk away from enforcing
its infamous red line on chemical weapons is a testament to that. Moreover, the
intervention for which most opposition in Syria called, especially in
2011-2012, never amounted to a call for the removal of Assad by military means,
but merely for stopping its violent attacks on opposition strongholds, including
the use of tanks and planes. With this accomplished, serious negotiations could
take place under UN auspices. The Obama Administration, however, has made a
practice of misrepresenting our demands, speaking of troops on the ground and
full-scale invasions and the like.

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